Finding Time for Pleasure This Summer

joy is not frivolous

Hey Heretics! I’m following my own advice and taking vacation this week, so I’m popping into your feed with a post from this time last year, which I, unthinkingly, dubbed my “summer of pleasure.” I MEANT pleasure as in: joy, delight, etc, though in hindsight, I can see why some of my readers thought I was going to be blogging about sex all summer. Whoops!

At any rate, I’m happy to report that many of last year’s “pleasure practices” are still going strong this summer! How about you? How are you finding joy, tiny delights, and pleasure during this season?

Photo by Elisabeth Wales on Unsplash

Recently, I was catching up with a friend whose daughter had joined an elite travel dance team. “She danced twenty hours last week,” my friend explained, before going on to complain about how her family’s weekends revolved around the dance team competition schedule. The expenses of the classes, costumes, and travel were enough to put a significant dent in family finances. And the kicker? This kid is eight.

For sure there are some families who love find a way to nurture their child’s interest and to make a close-knit group of friends as they participate in travel sports. They do exist. But most of the middle-class parents I know seem pretty miserable about their kids’ extracurriculars. They lament the huge costs but think they’re inevitable— “this is just what kids do now,” one friend said. These families want their kids to work hard and to develop skills which may eventually lead to a college scholarship, although stats show that less than two percent of high school athletes get scholarships, and most of those are only partial.

This probably all ties into what Substacker Melinda Wenner Moyer calls, “The Fallacy of Maternal Self-Sacrifice”: “the pernicious but pervasive idea 1) that we are only good mothers if we are constantly focused on our kids, and 2) that the moment we prioritize ourselves, we are directly harming our children.”

American culture, founded on Puritanism, tends to overvalue self-sacrifice and undervalue pleasure. And while I can’t blame parents for feeling anxious about college costs, I wonder about the tradeoffs of taking play and basically making it into a job for their kids. Because of capitalism’s push to “instrumentalize” our time, both kids and adults are pressured to monetize their hobbies. Why go for a jog when you can become a jogging influencer? Why doodle caricatures for fun when you can start taking commissions on Etsy?

The downside is that viewing a hobby with an eye towards monetization or productivity is almost certainly the way to zap the joy from it.

I have long felt this pressure to produce more writing, sell more articles, and build a bigger social media following. But during my “Summer of Pleasure” I also realized a truth: basically, no one cares! When it comes to hustle pressure, the call is coming from inside the house. Specifically, it’s coming from my Inner Critic, the part of me that’s tasked with protection. It says that I’m not a “real writer” until I sell a book, hit X number of Substack subscribers, or earn thousands of dollars per month.

The most important thing I’ve learned during my Summer of Pleasure is that joy is not frivolous. Prioritizing curiosity, sensuality, and rest is an act of resistance to hustle culture. It’s recognizing how many industries profit off our anxiety and outrage and choosing to limit my exposure to them. It’s single-tasking, it’s pausing mid-run to chat with a neighbor, it’s getting up from my chair and looking at whatever my kid is trying to show me. (Usually, a cat in a box.) It’s experiencing boredom, tiredness, and annoyance, and accepting that these feelings are part of life.

Here are three favorite discoveries from my Summer of Pleasure:

• Wearing perfume every day. What a nice sensory pick-me-up to catch a whiff at random moments throughout the day! I stumbled across a Jo Malone store while taking some time for myself on our family vacation to San Francisco. I loved smelling all the perfumes, I loved swapping travel recs with the clerk, I loved the totally unnecessary but adorable wrapping job he did. 10/10 would recommend.

• The Minimalist App for Android. No more losing oodles of time after mindlessly clicking on Instagram. This app eliminates icons and you can put your biggest time vampires into a “Hidden Apps” list that take an extra bit of effort to access. When you open a hidden app, you have to select how much time you’d like to spend there, at which time a black screen will pop up to ask if you’d REALLY like to devote another ten minutes to Facebook.

• Paddleboarding with my kids. Huzzah for spending time outdoors in an environment that precludes phone use! There have been some ups and downs as we’ve learned to paddleboard (the biggest included us nearly getting stranded on a very windy day) but it’s been a great family project.

If you’ve been pleasure-curious, I highly recommend taking a stretch of time and dedicating it to pleasure. Take a break from social media and spend time outside, face-to-face with those you love. Resist the urge to equate anxiety and busyness with intelligence and importance. Yes, sometimes ignorance equals bliss, but so does wisdom.

What are the messages you get about busyness and hustling? How do you find ways to resist that messaging? Do you have any tips for focusing more on pleasure? Let me know in the comments so we can learn from each other. And if you know someone who’s considering travel sports, why not share this article? The friend you save could be your own!